WorksThere Will Be Blood
Daniel Plainview is not the villain of There Will Be Blood. He is the endpoint. The film traces what instrumental attachment produces when it runs its full course without interruption: a man who has extracted everything available from every relationship he entered, is now alone with the extraction, and is genuinely unable to understand what people wanted from him all along. Paul Thomas Anderson made the film in near-silence for its first fifteen minutes. That silence is the argument.
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